Saturday, February 22, 2014

Edward Norgate's Miniatura; or The Art of Limning, composed probably in the late 1620s and revised two years before his death in 1650, contains an interesting early account of landscape painting. Landscape,
he writes, is 'an
Art
soe
new
in
England,
and
soe Lately
come
a
shore,
as
all
the
Language
within
our
fower
Seas
cannot
find
it
a
Name,
but
a
borrowed
one,
and
that
from
a
people
that
are
not
great
Lenders
but
upon
good
Securitie,
the
Dutch'. And in addition to giving us the word 'landscape', the Dutch (Flemish) provided the
best examples of this new kind of art: 'viz.
Paulo
Brill,
a
very
rare
Master
in
that
Art,
Liveing in Trinita del
Monte
in
Rome and
his
Contemporary,
Adam Elshamer,
termed
by
the
Italians
Diavolo
per
gli
cose
piccole [a devil for little things],
Momper,
Bruegel,
Coningslo,
and
last
but
not
least
Sir
Peter
Rubens,
a
Gentleman
of
great
parts
and
abilities
(over
and
above
his
Pencill)
and
knighted
by
the
best
of
Kings
or
Men.'

Peter Paul Rubens, Landscape, c. 1635-40

Rubens was actually knighted twice, by both Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England, but we can safely assume Norgate was referring to the latter since he was the King's adviser on art. He started out as a calligrapher and limner and may have worked in the studio of Nicholas Hilliard. Subsequently, as the editors of Art in Theoryexplain, 'he was to earn his living as a cultured civil servant' and became a herald at the College of Arms. His knowledge of Flemish landscape painting would have come partly from visits to the Low Countries on behalf of the King and the Earl of Arundel, who were each building up great art collections. Norgate defined 'landscape' as 'nothing
but
a
picture
of
Gli
belle
Vedute,
or
beautifull
prospect
of
Feilds,
Cities,
Rivers,
Castles,
Mountaines,
Trees
or
what
soever
delightfull
view
the
Eye
takes
pleasure
in.' The examples he gives suggest a taste for what later writers would see as aspects of the Sublime: inaccessible mountains, precipices and 'Torrents
about
the
Alpes
that
with
a
roaring
noise
make
hast
to
breake
their
necks
from
those
fearfull
Rocks
into
the
Sea'. In earlier times such scenes had
been used only to set off the figures in history painting or in 'filling
up the empty Corners'. But this new art, though
'a Noveltie', was 'yet a good one, that to the Inventors and Professors hath brought honour and profit.'

Joos de Momper, Rocky Landscape, c 1610-30

I will conclude here with the story Norgate says he heard abroad about the creation of the very first independent landscape painting:

'A
Gentleman
of
Antwerpe
being
a
great
Liefhebber [Lover
of
Art]
returning
from
a
long
Journey
he
had
made
about
the
Countrey
of
Liege
and
Forrest
of
Ardenna,
comes
to
visit his
old
friend,
an
ingenious
painter
of
that
Citie,
whose
House
and
Company
he
useually
frequented.
The
Painter
he
finds
at
his
Easill -
at
worke
- which
he
very
dilligently
intends,
while
his
newcome
friend,
walking
by,
recountes
the
adventures
of
his
long
Journey,
and
with
all
what
Cities
he
saw,
what
beautiful
prospects
he
beheld
in
a
Country
of
a
strange Scitiation,
full
of
Alpine
Rocks,
old
Castle,
and
extrordinary
buildings
&c.
With
which
relation
(growing
long)
the
prompt
and
ready
Painter
was
soe
delighted
as,
unregarded
by
his
walking
friend,
he
layes
by
his
worke,
and
on
a
new
Table
begins
to
paint
what
the
other
spake,
describing
his
description
in
a
more
legible
and
lasting
Character
then
the others
words. In
short,
by
that
time
the
Gentleman
had
ended
his
long
Discourse,
the
Painter
had
brought
his
worke
to
that
perfecton,
as
the
Gentleman
at
parting,
by
chance
casting
his
eye
that
way,
was
astonisht
with
wonder,
to
see
those
places
and
that
Countrey
soe
lively
exprest
by
the
Painter
as
if
hee
had
seene
with
his
eyes
or
bene
his
Companion
in
the
Journey.'

Friday, February 14, 2014

'And how can it be,' asked Georges Bataille, 'that a landscape, formed of interrelated appearances without any meaning, can, according to the position of the eye, in one place be empty and without charm, and in another be a breach opened upon a dazzling world?' Patterns in nature - laws of affinity and contrast - are enough to distract us from the void. Even cities, 'the expression of the human will, show the opposition of the noble world of rich stone monuments and the abject and wild world of the slums.' When we see such contrasts of light and shadow it is impossible to imagine the world as empty. 'But the screen on which light and shadow are happily composed dissipates and is decomposed sometimes as quickly as a dream-image. Then apathy, apathy without a heart and without disgust takes hold of the space occupied by the will to live — hard and cold apathy which reduces fountains, summits and beautiful landscapes to what they are.' In this state of realisation, a man 'looks at the world of illusions with slow anger. He shuts himself into an oppressive silence, and as he places his naked foot on the humid earth, feeling himself sinking into nature and being annihilated by it, it is with anguished joy.'

At the excellent Art Cornwall Site you can read the full translation by Patrick ffrench of Bataille's text, Le paysage (1938), along with a useful explanatory note. In this piece, he writes, Bataille is suggesting that 'our projections of beauty or horror onto the landscape, which constitute what we think of as ‘landscape’, are necessary illusions, without which man confronts a world without meaning, which rejects him, as long as he does not consider himself part of it and destined to return to it. But this identification with the earth is also disallowed him, since his consciousness of the world forever separates him from it.' And yet Bataille concludes that there is 'a joy in being subsumed by nature, which looks forward to the moment when the thin crust of human industry will be submerged under the rising oceans of the planet ... It is from the hypothesis of such a strange perspective that the fragile constructions man has erected on the surface of the earth can be looked upon now, with ‘slow anger’.'

Joseph Gandy, The Bank of England as a ruin, 1830

The images we are seeing on the news of towns sinking under flood water certainly underline the fragility of our constructions. Here in London the long rains have left us largely unaffected, but the constant ebb and flow of people and the ever-changing cityscape make it feel like a 'world of illusions', built on shifting power relations and unseen channels of commerce rather than solid ground. There is a poem by Allen Fisher called 'After Georges Bataille's 'Landscape'' in his book 'Becoming' (part of the Place sequence which he worked on throughout the 1970s). It begins with a version of the words I quote above - 'Cities express the human will' - and describes London's transformation into the Bank of the World, its pursuit of money and the extraction of profit ('it pays / to cyanide gold'). All this activity leaves us with a greater loss, of 'love, / work and knowledge / in the light without shade.' Whilst Bataille ends his text with a man feeling himself sinking into nature, Fisher's poem closes with the image of 'a concrete that separates city from land / laid by men unaware they will soon not breathe.'

Friday, February 07, 2014

In Meer der Tusche (2005), Swiss writer Richard Weihe tells in 51 short chapters the life story of the great seventeenth century Chinese painter Bada Shanren. Sea of Ink, an English translation by James Bulloch, is available from Peirene Press, a recently established 'boutique publishing house' that runs literary salons in north London. In the Peirene Experience clip below you can see Weihe talking about one particular incident in the childhood of Zhu Da (Bada Shanren, 'man on the mountain of the eight compass points', was one of the many names he assumed in later life). Zhu's father, also an artist, 'made him step barefoot into a bowl full of ink and then walk along the length of a roll of paper. To begin with, Zhu's footprints were wet and black; with each step they became lighter until they were barely visible any more.' This reminded me of the Bada Shanren scroll I mentioned here last year, and naturally too of Richard Long. Next to Zhu's footprints his father wrote these words: 'A small segment of the long path of my son Zhu Da. And further down: A path comes into existence by being walked on.'

Sea of Ink is punctuated with vivid descriptions of the artist creating his work, the paintings emerging as a short sequence of inspired brushstrokes. We read about the composition of Fish and Rocks (above) for example, whilst Bada Shanren is living alone on the shore of a lake. It is a work that the Met website describes as 'profoundly unsettling. Were it not for
seven tiny fish that swim beneath the two rock forms, transforming the
blank paper into a body of water, the image would be unrecognisable. Six
of the fish are shown in profile, but the seventh appears as if seen
from above, leaving the viewer disoriented; the absence of a horizon
line adds to the unsettling effect.' In Sea of Ink, Bada hangs this finished work from his ceiling beams and watches as a gust of wind catches it, so that the fish seem to be floating in the air.

A few years later Bada was returning in the rain to his fisherman's hut when he senses his life fading away. Wiehle imagines him looking at the view that will become Landscape with hut (1699): 'Was it the trees dripping in the mist which made the world appear like that, or was it the tears in his eyes? No sooner was he back in his abode than he took a large piece of paper and wiped it with the wet sleeve of his robe. He hurriedly poured water into the rubbing stone and prepared the ink...' First, he described his hut in seven vertical and diagonal strokes. Then he took a new brush with cropped bristles and transformed the damp paper into a landscape of half seen hills. The small solitary house had the appearance of having turned its back to the world. 'Fine streams of ink ran down the mountain; indeed the entire mountain seemed to flow away as if it were nothing more than a large wound of the world.'

About this site

This blog explores landscape through the arts: painting, installation, photography, literature, music, film... I've also on occasion covered the creation or alteration of landscapes by architects, artists and garden designers. For the first year I did several short entries each week; since then I have reduced the frequency and some posts are a bit longer. In naming this site 'Some Landscapes' initially I just saw it as a few modest notes and didn't know if I'd keep it up. Of course it will always only cover 'some' landscapes, even though I occasionally like to think of it as an expanding cultural gazetteer. There is a pretty long index (see above) listing the artists of all kinds that have been mentioned here. There are also maps and a chronology of posts. I started writing this blog using the name 'Plinius' (a little tribute to the younger and older Plinys) and am now rather attached to it as a 'nom de blog'. Comments are very welcome but are moderated to prevent spam. Plinus / Andrew Ray.